#UAE #AIinfrastructure - Abu Dhabi-based modular AI data centre company Hyperfusion has come out of stealth with a novel data centre offering and a partnership with computer data storage company VAST Data. The two companies this week launched Sentinel, a complete AI data centre in a single 45-foot container, commissioned in a factory and delivered to the customer’s site. VAST Data’s platform as its preferred data platform. The offering aims to bring sovereign, confidential AI inference online in weeks, not years, as is usually the case with the traditional data centre build cycle.
SO WHAT? - Large enterprises may have the budgets for data infrastructure, but production AI can be stuck behind waits of 18 to 24 months for data centre capacity, according to Hyperfusion’s CEO Quentin Reyes. Sentinel is built in a factory and shipped to wherever power exists, with data staying in-country and units able to run air-gapped. No details are available on delivery times and costs, and a technical validation with VAST is still under way.
KEY POINTS:
Hyperfusion came out of stealth this week with Sentinel, a containerised AI data centre and a partnership with computer data storage company VAST Data.
Sentinel is a complete AI data centre commissioned in a factory and packed into a transportable 45-foot ISO High Cube container. The reference configuration is 96 GPUs and about two to three petabytes of data capacity.
Founder and CEO Quentin Reyes says the company built Sentinel because it couldn’t buy the infrastructure it needed. Hyperfusion has run a GPU cloud since 2023, and its release dates its managed GPU cloud to 2024, so confirm which year applies.
Sentinel can be bought as a customer-owned system or run by Hyperfusion as a managed service. The offering supports confidential computing, which protects models and data while in use, and can be deployed on-premises, in-country or fully air-gapped.
HyperPod extends the modular approach to larger, multi-megawatt deployments. It’s a 5 MW pod, and each one scales to around 20 petabytes.
Hyperfusion and VAST Data plan to integrate the VAST AI Operating System into Sentinel as its preferred data platform, creating a jointly developed offering. Sentinel and HyperPod sites can share a single global namespace, so each new site doesn’t become a data silo.
The target customers for Sentinel are government, enterprise, telecommunications and energy organisations needing rapid or sovereign AI deployment. The focus is inference, which increasingly needs to run close to users, data or available power.
The two companies will begin joint go-to-market activity while completing technical validation of VAST inside Sentinel and HyperPod. They also plan to explore a common control plane for managing distributed Sentinel deployments across multiple sites.
Hyperfusion is exhibiting at NVIDIA GTC Berlin from 20 to 22 October. It sees rising demand from multimodal models, computer vision and physical AI, where data needs grow sharply alongside compute.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: Hyperfusion, VAST Data
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